Transferring rent money to account not in my name.

[wellnowwhat]

Hi, everyone.

I'm planning to file Chapter 7 individually, without my wife. My wife and I have a joint bank account into which both of our paychecks are deposited. Typically I split the rent payment up between our pay periods, essentially putting away half on the 5th of the month and half on the 20th. I usually place half the rent in our joint savings account, but I was dinged several times recently for making too many withdrawals from our savings account and told that if it continued they'd close the account.

For this month I transferred the first half of the rent into a checking account in my wife's name just to keep it separate from the rest of our spending money and to avoid the negative activity on our savings account. Once the other half of the rent money comes in I will either transfer the money back over to our joint account and pay the rent or transfer the rest of the money to her individual account and pay the rent.

After doing some reading on filing, however, I now have a concern: Will the transfer of money from a joint account in my name to my wife's account which is not in my name look like a "fraudulent" transfer? The only reason I'm transferring the money is to pay the rent from her account and keep us from spending that money. It's not a gift or an attempt to hide any money from the trustee or my creditors.

Thoughts? Opinions? Funny anecdotes?

[justbroke]

It really depends on the Trustee and how thorough they are want to examine your bank accounts. They are looking for hidden assets. You can explain, just as you did here, how you move the money around to pay the housing costs. Your only real problem is if there is money there on the day of filing and you have no way to exempt the (cash) money.

[wellnowwhat]

It really depends on the Trustee and how thorough they are want to examine your bank accounts. They are looking for hidden assets. You can explain, just as you did here, how you move the money around to pay the housing costs. Your only real problem is if there is money there on the day of filing and you have no way to exempt the (cash) money.

Okay. In that case I may just move the money over into our savings account so it doesn't look like it just disappeared and be hyper-diligent about leaving it alone. Though I suspect there won't be much of an issue given that a good chunk of the money in our joint account actually belongs to my wife (by nature of the fact that it's from her paycheck and not mine).

Fortunately, it looks like the Oregon exemption amount for bank accounts is fairly high, much higher than any money my wife and I will ever have in our accounts.